I'm a huge fan of Bruce Lee, both from his films and a lot more because of his philosophy on the martial arts and fighting in general. I think I posted something ages ago about him being relevant, which I will probably repeat most of below.
Payne is right when he says that there are a lot of delusional fans of his and I cringe whenever I read posts from a dickhead who has just seen Enter The Dragon (one of my favourite movies of all time!!) and claims Bruce Lee could kick Gods arse.
I have to disagree about evidence of his fighting credentials, however.
There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that he could hold his own in a fight, even against much bigger opponents. Although the stories get blown up a bit over time, I believe the facts remain true. Anyone who can hold their own sparring against Chuck Norris (insert favourite Chuck Norris factoid here
) despite being 50-60 pounds lighter and a lot shorter could surely fight
In saying that, I don't how he would have fared as a professional or sport fighter because his philosophy was based around real life situations and not combat sport. A lot of his most effective strikes and holds would be illegal in todays MMA.
There was an outtake or it may have actually been in one of his movies but there was a scene in one of his later movies where he was training a kid. They spar and Lee ends up with the kid in an armbar. The kid taps and Bruce berates him. He slaps the kid and asks him why he didn't bite his leg to try to break the armbar. The kid said that biting while fighting was dishonourable. Bruce explains that once a situation becomes violent, the honour in the situation has already gone so it then becomes win at all costs.
While this was just a movie scene, Bruce Lee had started to use his movies as a way of explaining his ideas of combat. And as you can see it is important to separate the ideas of real combat and sport combat.
But he had an incredible thirst for knowledge and I believe he would be a great trainer or coach today if he were alive.
While Payne is right in saying that he was a dancer first, yes but only in his childhood. He was a child actor and that's when most of his dancing was done. You can probably credit the dancing for his balance and efficiency of movement when fighting so it was all positive in the end.
Fighting has a history as long as humanity so there can, in my opinion, be no one person who "invented" MMA. It has been a sport developed over thousands of years and is still developing. The Gracies get a lot of credit but they only started the UFC to prove BJJ was better than anything else, not to embrace the concept of MMA. You could argue that BJJ and fighting effectively off your back was the last piece of the jigsaw in making a complete MMA fighter, I guess.
Payne is right that Lee gets a lot of credit because he was able to broadcast his views to a wider audience but it is no reason to hold it against him because a lot of what he said was right. He never claimed to have started MMA or to have been the perfect fighter but his philosophy was based on always improving your skills and fighting to your strengths, all qualities of the best MMArtists at the moment.
The thing that interests me is that his background was Chinese martial arts which don't seem to be overly represented amongst the top echelons of MMA. Maybe someone can tell me otherwise because I am not that clued up on the backgrounds of todays fighters. Bruce Lee was highly critical of a lot of aspects of Chinese martial arts like some of their overly flamboyant and ineffective strikes and positionings.
He is relevant to MMA today because, whether you believe he deserves to be or not, he is a modern day icon whose name and image can almost be considered to be synonymous with the term martial arts who claimed that no one martial art held all the answers. The sport of MMA as it is today is proof of that. There have been many of people who have known this through the history of combat but they have not popularised the concept as well as he has (fair enough, some of them didn't have the means) and he should be given credit for that.
Bruce Lee - Legend!!!
Note to self - stop writing about Bruce Lee when stoned
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welcome Sue!
